March 31, 2015

• Publishing again

  So.  I was writing an email to my dear friend Zakiah @zsa_md (does that trick really work?  I've never used the at sign to link before) thanking her and Eugenia at Xanga for letting me publish again.  It appears as if some of my options have changed, with regard to making a hyperlink.  I see something over there on the right, under the Format heading, I obviously need more education.  

  Wish I had time for experimenting.  Millions of thoughts I want to share.

  It's kind of ironic that my last published post before this (back in September) was about my attempt to quit watching football.  Didn't QUITE work, but I kind of loved that being the last post, especially when one of my San Francisco 49er heroes, Chris Borland, publicly retired after his rookie season because of his concerns for his health -- still good and he wants it to stay that way so he's removed himself from the field of combat, which has been analogized, not unreasonably, to what the Roman gladiators had to go through just to please the leering masses who took pleasure from watching men fight to their death in the gladiatorial ring.  

  But now that the 49er squad has been decimated by a mass of defections, maybe I can separate myself from watching NEXT season.  We'll see.

  In other news, only two or three of my most loyal readers even know that I got fired from the wonderful job I had at Indian River Medical Center.  What they did was, they outsourced Security to a company that agreed to supply them with armed officers, and I don't do guns.  I was supposed to keep working for them anyway, but after eight weeks of treating me rather obnoxiously, they up and told me to get out even though I did nothing to deserve being separated from a job I loved and was good at and was needed at.

  So one of the reasons I have to cut this short (well, ok, it's not short but it's shorter than I want it to be) is that I have to go to the reemployment office for a workshop that counts as five job searches so that I can get my unemployment check while I continue to look for work.  There ARE some good prospects out there for me, but I just don't have time to go into everything right now.  Maybe another day.

  Meanwhile, I continue to keep up with the news.  I'm proud of the North American Scrabble Players Association for deciding to cancel their contract to stage their 2016 National Championship in Fort Wayne, IN, by way of making a statement that they oppose SB101, a bill recently signed by Indiana Governor Mike Pence which gives businesspeople license, under cover of religious freedom, to refuse service to individuals whose religions or lifestyles or skin colors offend them.  I DO understand that there's a benign way of looking at the bill, but I'm persuaded that it's a bad law regardless of the possibility of benign intent (which I kind of doubt).

  And then there's the plane crash.  Andreas Lubitz, it appears, deliberately locked the captain out of the cockpit and crashed a plane filled with 150 passengers into the French Alps, killing them all.  Lubitz was a copilot, 1/2 of the cockpit crew, and there's strong evidence that he was mentally ill, suffered from depression and suicidal tendencies, and the main reason he was able to get away with what he did is that he was able to barricade himself in the cockpit and THAT's because of what happened on 9/11/01.

  Well, I know we have to do something about 9/11-style terrorism, but there are two OTHER courses of action that need to be taken:

  (1)  Repeal that stupid HIPPA law and instead of hassling people who reveal sensitive health information that needs to be kept private for the protection of patients, INSTEAD of that, hassle insurance companies and employers who discriminate against sick people.  (Not going to happen, I know.  I'm just dreaming here.)

  (2) And destigmatize mental illness.  Had Lubitz felt free to come clean, 149 more people would be alive today.  Of course, he might have had to give up his dream to be a pilot, but he needed to be talked out of living that dream anyway, didn't he?

  • 10:18 am
  • 3 Comments